Git how to download all branches

Getting changes from a remote repository

In this article

You can use common Git commands to access remote repositories.

Options for getting changes

Cloning a repository

To grab a complete copy of another user’s repository, use git clone like this:

You can choose from several different URLs when cloning a repository. While logged in to GitHub, these URLs are available below the repository details:

Fetching changes from a remote repository

Use git fetch to retrieve new work done by other people. Fetching from a repository grabs all the new remote-tracking branches and tags without merging those changes into your own branches.

If you already have a local repository with a remote URL set up for the desired project, you can grab all the new information by using git fetch *remotename* in the terminal:

Otherwise, you can always add a new remote and then fetch. For more information, see «Managing remote repositories.»

Merging changes into your local branch

Merging combines your local changes with changes made by others.

Typically, you’d merge a remote-tracking branch (i.e., a branch fetched from a remote repository) with your local branch:

Pulling changes from a remote repository

git pull is a convenient shortcut for completing both git fetch and git merge in the same command:

Git how to download all branches

The git clone command is used to create a copy of a specific repository or branch within a repository.

Git is a distributed version control system. Maximize the advantages of a full repository on your own machine by cloning.

What Does git clone Do?

Cloning a repository is typically only done once, at the beginning of your interaction with a project. Once a repository already exists on a remote, like on GitHub, then you would clone that repository so you could interact with it locally. Once you have cloned a repository, you won’t need to clone it again to do regular development.

The ability to work with the entire repository means that all developers can work more freely. Without being limited by which files you can work on, you can work on a feature branch to make changes safely. Then, you can:

How to Use git clone

Common usages and options for git clone

You can see all of the many options with git clone in git-scm’s documentation.

Examples of git clone

git clone A Branch

To clone one specific branch, use:

Cloning only one branch does not add any benefits unless the repository is very large and contains binary files that slow down the performance of the repository. The recommended solution is to optimize the performance of the repository before relying on single branch cloning strategies.

git clone With SSH

Depending on how you authenticate with the remote server, you may choose to clone using SSH.

Get started with git and GitHub

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How to download a branch with git?

I have a project hosted on GitHub. I created a branch on one computer, then pushed my changes to GitHub with:

Now I am on a different computer, and I want to download that branch. So I tried:

. but all this did was overwrite my master branch with the changes in my new branch.

What do I need to do to properly pull my remote branch, without overwriting existing branches?

11 Answers 11

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Thanks to a related question, I found out that I need to «checkout» the remote branch as a new local branch, and specify a new local branch name.

The latter will create a branch that is also set to track the remote branch.

Update: It’s been 5 years since I originally posted this question. I’ve learned a lot and git has improved since then. My usual workflow is a little different now.

If I want to fetch the remote branches, I simply run:

This will fetch all of the remote branches and merge the current branch. It will display an output that looks something like this:

Normally, I would need to create the branch before I could check it out, but in newer versions of git, it’s smart enough to know that you want to checkout a local copy of this remote branch.

Git Hub Clone All Branches At Once

I’m trying to clone an entire repository onto my machine using linux. I used

I then went into the folder where it was downloaded and typed

in the terminal. It’s only showing me master and not other branches which were in the remote repository. How do I clone all branches?

I know that for each branch in the remote I can separately use

but is there any way other than that?

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(1) Inside git local repostitory, create a new sh file

(2) Insert the below content to getAllBranches.sh file:

(3) Get all branches:

(4) Check result at local repository:

As you can see, I have fetched all branches to local machine:

This isn’t too much complicated, very simple and straight forward steps are as follows:

If you want to work on remote branch, you’ll need to create a local tracking branch:

Verify whether you are in the desired branch by the following command;

The output will like this;

Notice the * sign that denotes the current branch.

Then after the repo is clone with all its branches then do the following

It’s only showing me master and not other branches which were in the remote repository. How do I clone all branches?

Branches are essentially pointers to commits. When you do a git clone (or a git fetch ), you retrieve all of the commits from the remote repository, and all of its branches as well.

It’s worth noting that tags do not operate this way, and there is no distinction between a local and remote tag.

I find this to be the simple solution to clone a git repository and all remote branches:

that makes your repo completely identical.

This will create a folder called repository.git unless you give it a different name.

mkdir mv repository.git /.git cd git checkout master

Git how to download all branches

Check your version of git by running

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

After the clone, a plain git fetch without arguments will update all the remote-tracking branches, and a git pull without arguments will in addition merge the remote master branch into the current master branch, if any (this is untrue when «—single-branch» is given; see below).

This default configuration is achieved by creating references to the remote branch heads under refs/remotes/origin and by initializing remote.origin.url and remote.origin.fetch configuration variables.

OPTIONS

Operate quietly. Progress is not reported to the standard error stream.

Run verbosely. Does not affect the reporting of progress status to the standard error stream.

No checkout of HEAD is performed after the clone is complete.

Fail if the source repository is a shallow repository. The clone.rejectShallow configuration variable can be used to specify the default.

Employ a sparse-checkout, with only files in the toplevel directory initially being present. The git-sparse-checkout[1] command can be used to grow the working directory as needed.

When given, and the repository to clone from is accessed via ssh, this specifies a non-default path for the command run on the other end.

Specify the directory from which templates will be used; (See the «TEMPLATE DIRECTORY» section of git-init[1].)

Set a configuration variable in the newly-created repository; this takes effect immediately after the repository is initialized, but before the remote history is fetched or any files checked out. The key is in the same format as expected by git-config[1] (e.g., core.eol=true ). If multiple values are given for the same key, each value will be written to the config file. This makes it safe, for example, to add additional fetch refspecs to the origin remote.

Create a shallow clone with a history after the specified time.

Create a shallow clone with a history, excluding commits reachable from a specified remote branch or tag. This option can be specified multiple times.

After the clone is created, initialize and clone submodules within based on the provided pathspec. If no pathspec is provided, all submodules are initialized and cloned. This option can be given multiple times for pathspecs consisting of multiple entries. The resulting clone has submodule.active set to the provided pathspec, or «.» (meaning all submodules) if no pathspec is provided.

All submodules which are cloned will be shallow with a depth of 1.

Instead of placing the cloned repository where it is supposed to be, place the cloned repository at the specified directory, then make a filesystem-agnostic Git symbolic link to there. The result is Git repository can be separated from working tree.

The number of submodules fetched at the same time. Defaults to the submodule.fetchJobs option.

The (possibly remote) repository to clone from. See the GIT URLS section below for more information on specifying repositories.

The name of a new directory to clone into. The «humanish» part of the source repository is used if no directory is explicitly given ( repo for /path/to/repo.git and foo for host.xz:foo/.git ). Cloning into an existing directory is only allowed if the directory is empty.

GIT URLS

In general, URLs contain information about the transport protocol, the address of the remote server, and the path to the repository. Depending on the transport protocol, some of this information may be absent.

Git supports ssh, git, http, and https protocols (in addition, ftp, and ftps can be used for fetching, but this is inefficient and deprecated; do not use it).

The native transport (i.e. git:// URL) does no authentication and should be used with caution on unsecured networks.

The following syntaxes may be used with them: